Trojan Information
Trojan
infections are increasing all the time, but many of the people who are infected
with trojans do not fully understand what a remote access trojan is, or the functions
they can perform.
When people think of trojans, they normally think of a huge wooden horse that the
Greeks gifted the city of Troy in which they had secretly hidden their warriors.
Computer trojans are based on the same idea; they appear to be harmless when often
they harbour a secret malicious backdoor letting in hackers.
Most trojans are not viruses, meaning they do not have the ability to reproduce
themselves; they rely on the deceptiveness of people to propagate them in the wild.
There are about 5 main types of remote access trojans and various subsets of these. The most common type of trojan is the remote administration type, these include Subseven, netbus, back orifice etc. These types of trojans give the hacker more power over the victims computer then the victim may have originally had. They include such functions as the ability to steal all passwords cached or not (this is done using key logging technology), modify the victims registry, upload, download, execute (run) files, and various other things like turning on a web cam and spying on a victim.
The second
type of trojan is a file server trojan; these trojans create a file server,
usually an ftp server on the remote victims computer allowing a hacker to upload
or download files, this is commonly used to upload a powerful remote administration
trojan. Because some of these file server trojans are small, (some are just 8 kbs)
they are easily bound to other files making no significant size change. These are
most commonly found in games and funny programs that people send around the internet
to amuse each other not realising they are infecting them selves and there friends
with trojans.
The third type of trojan is the password sending trojans, these trojans have
one purpose and that is to steal passwords from the victim's computer and send them
back to the hacker, the most common way these trojans communicate with the hacker
is by email. Its pretty scary to think that your computer is sending a hacker secret
emails with all your passwords.
Fourth on the list is key logger trojans; these trojans log everything the
victim types and either sends the info to the hacker by way of email or stores the
typed info in a secret file located on the victims computer which the hacker then
downloads using the client part of the trojan
The fifth type of trojan is probably one of the most disturbing types to
be recently developed; this is the distributed denial of service trojans or DDoS.
A hacker infects a large number of victims with a DDoS trojan, then using the client
part of the trojan he can connect either to all of them at once or he sends his
commands to a drone (a master server) that then sends the commands out to all the
victims to attack a single website or persons pc. These types of trojans have been
used recently to bring down big sites like yahoo.com